Ekurhuleni. Phil Bonner

ever-present threat of destitution. In a sequence of strikes in 1928–1929 and 1931–1932, the women members of the GWU caught the popular imagination of the Rand either for the colourful and exuberant style of their strike (bright colours, gay processions of music and dancing, according to the Rand Daily Mail) or for their fearsome confrontational militancy (‘Wild Women’) which struck an equal measure of fear and alarm into the Rand Daily Mail’s readers. Of the two, the 1931 strike was more effective. In Germiston in 1931 exciting scenes were reported as ‘a huge demonstration of workers paraded in the streets ... carrying a big red banner before them and flaunting red dresses, red rosettes and red ties everywhere’. Both the strikes of 1931 and 1932 took place in the midst of the recession. The first was barely drawn, the second was devastatingly lost. After this the GWU lay in ruins until painstakingly put together again from the shop floor upwards by Solly and his chief lieutenants, Johanna Cornelius and Anna Scheepers. In an amazing turn-about it had largely recovered by 1934.¹⁸

      Striking garment workers

      The GWU was remarkable and pioneering for its militancy, for its capacity to mobilise Afrikaner women, and for the cross-racial co-operation it achieved with the black South African Clothing Workers’ Union (SACWU). This relationship was not without its contradictions since Afrikaner women members continued to practise social discrimination against blacks, and insisted that black workers be organised in a separate, parallel structure.¹⁹ The arm’s length co-operation that resulted, however, was a real step towards multi/non-racial unionism, broke down racial prejudices among a generation of Afrikaner female GWU leaders, nurtured the militant black leadership in the SACWU which would make a major mark on the political scene (see Chapter 6), and opened up a space which would be more widely exploited during World War II.

      One last multi-racial trade union flourish would take place in Ekurhuleni in the middle years of the war. This was among female and African male shop workers who belonged to the National Union of Distributive Workers and its parallel, the African Commercial and Distributive Workers Union, and who worked in the large chain stores like Ackermans, Woolworths and OK Bazaars that had first rose to prominence in the 1920s. In 1943 a strike, which arose from a dispute over wages, working conditions and trade union rights, broke out. It lasted 17 days and was responsible for 39 853 days lost in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and other industrial centres. In much the same way as was the case with the Afrikaner female and African male workers of the Garment Workers’ Union it brought out both white and black workers in a remarkable display of multi-racial unity, through which it won most of its demands.²⁰

      Germiston was thus in the vanguard of two developments which would transform the Ekurhuleni area. The first was secondary industrialisation, which before long would offer a new lifeline to all Ekurhuleni’s towns as gold mining went into decline, and it could assume its position as ‘the workshop of the Rand’. The second was the rise of industrial trade unionism in secondary industry, initially spearheaded by Solly Sachs and the Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers’ Union, but later developing into a multi-racial trade union movement, which is discussed in Chapter 7.

       THE LOSS OF SOCIAL CONTROL: BLACK WOMEN

      From the 1920s a substantial stream of African women were also arriving in the Ekurhuleni towns, which by the late 1930s had grown into something close to a torrent. The first major influx occurred during and immediately after World War I. A census conducted at the end of 1921, for example, disclosed the numbers and proportions of men to women shown in Table 2.²¹

Table 2: Census results, 1921

		No. of houses	Men	Women	Children	Total
Germiston	Georgetown	612	750	700	2 020	3 470
Boksburg	Location No. 1	502	710	675	675	2 060
	Location No. 2	139	170	140	160	470
Benoni	Municipal location	459	540	546	1 641	2 727
Springs	Government farm	410	662	753	1 249	2 664

      These figures already reflected relatively equal proportions of women to men – which suggests they were living in family units, with growing numbers of children. Women were in many senses able to fly under the official radar since they were not required to carry passes, and were free either to join genuine husbands or to claim one from part of the black urban community’s floating male population on occasions when their right to remain in an urban area was challenged. As a result a growing number of single or ‘unattached’ women, many displaced by tightening restrictions on black farm labourer families on white farms, made their way to the towns.²² The ingredients for two decades of conflict and two decades of black women’s self-assertion and independence were, in this manner, set in place.

      The first national effort to regain control of the country’s black urban populations, which was inspired above all by the perceived problems on the Rand, was the (Natives) Urban Areas Act of 1923. The principal thrust of the Act was to implement urban racial segregation which required the removal of Africans from inner city mixed residential areas and slums.²³ In this it substantially failed across Ekurhuleni. The second purpose of the Act was to provide relatively standardised location regulations for the new locations which had been established all across the Reef, through which it intended to bring those populations under close surveillance and control. This object was frustrated above all by the agency of black urban women, despite amendments to the Act passed in 1930 and 1937 which attempted both to restrict the entry of black urban women (and secondarily men) and to secure the removal of those designated ‘idle and dissolute’.²⁴ The extent of the failure of these measures can be gauged by the rate of increase of black women resident in Ekurhuleni’s towns in the 1920s which ranged from 58.6% in Brakpan to 158.9% in Germiston.²⁵ New standardised Reef-wide location regulations aimed at containing this process and its effects were drafted in 1925, but then were repeatedly overturned by legal challenges which were in most cases sponsored by black urban women. One of the most tumultuous, enduring and successful areas of such contestation were the Ekurhuleni towns. Here the primary objection expressed to the new regulatory regime was towards lodgers’ registration and lodgers’ fees. These not only imposed a generalised economic burden, along with more effective control, but were also levied on the adult (i.e. post 18 or 21 years old) sons and daughters of location resident site holders. This provision was particularly and deeply offensive to Reef location women and spurred them into a variety of confrontations with the authorities over the next few years. Initially location residents turned to the law and in a series of highly successful Supreme Court challenges had location regulations overturned (mainly on technicalities) as